We’ve known for a long time that we wanted some kind of color grading to happen in the postprocessing for The Witness; recently we started thinking about what that should be. Shannon wanted to try having colored shadows, as painters often do. We considered different ways of doing this; the …
As mentioned in the previous couple of updates, we are starting to take steps toward establishing the visual style of the game. This past week while I was on vacation, Shannon did a bunch of world editing, with the primary goal being to draft out a few areas of the …
Until now, we had been using Uncharted-2-style blend mapping to color our terrain. This is a way of using a low-resolution texture map to control the blending of high-resolution textures; this gives you the ability to maintain fine pixel-by-pixel detail while also blending between multiple textures in order to create …
Now that the gameplay is further along, we are starting to think more seriously about how the game is going to look. Shape and color are very important thematically; one idea that’s been floating around for a while is that different locations on the island would have very different color …
In a previous post I mentioned that we had done a bunch of playtesting at the GDC. As a result of that playtesting, I ended up heavily restructuring some areas of the game world. On top of that, there were a few areas that had been incomplete at that time, …
This month was time for the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco [this has been its official name for a while now: the completely ungrammatical “Game Developers Conference”. Whatever.] We used this opportunity to have game designer friends come and playtest The Witness. We did somewhere between 40 and …
Since The Witness takes place in the outdoors much of the time, we knew from early on that we were going to want to have grass of some kind. We added grass into the engine quite a long time ago (starting around December 2009?) and it’s gone through several iterations …
This is an experiment in writing up a blog post for a development task while I actually perform the task! So right now, as I start writing this, I don’t know how it will end! I was talking to David Hellman about the game the other day, and he was …
During the past couple of weeks, we have been doing some experiments for The Witness that involve pre-rendering a scene with a fisheye lens and then using that render during gameplay. If I were to say exactly what this is for, it would be a massive spoiler, so I’ll just …
Something like a year and a half ago, when I was starting to get serious about making The Witness, I was talking to Casey Muratori about 3D modeling and texturing. Braid was a 2D game; The Witness being 3D meant that it would be much more expensive and difficult to …